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A driver in St. Louis, Mo., pulled out a handset from under his car's dashboard, placed a phone call and made history.
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Something better — cellular telephone service — had been conceived in 1947 by D.H. Ring at Bell Labs, but the idea was not ready for prime time.
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One of the earliest fictional descriptions of a mobile phone can be found in the 1948 science fiction novel Space Cadet by Robert Heinlein.
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In 1949 AT&T commercialized Mobile Telephone Service
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In the USSR, Leonid Kupriyanovich, an engineer from Moscow, in 1957-1961 developed and presented a number of experimental models of handheld mobile phones
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In the UK there was also a vehicle based system called "Post Office Radiophone Service"[13] it was launched around the city of Manchester in 1959, and although it required callers to speak to an operator, it was possible to be put through to any subscriber in Great Britain
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The weight of one model, presented in 1961, was only 70 g and could fit on a palm
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AT&T introduced the first major improvement to mobile telephony in 1965, giving the improved service the obvious name of Improved Mobile Telephone Service. IMTS used additional radio channels, allowing more simultaneous calls in a given geographic area, introduced customer dialing, eliminating manual call setup by an operator, and reduced the size and weight of the subscriber equipment.
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The service was extended to London in 1965 and other major cities in 1972.
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RCC based services were provided until the 1980s when cellular AMPS systems made RCC equipment obsolete.
